The Greatest Showman (Movie Review)

The Greatest Showman is a loose biographical film about P. T. Barnum and his role as an American Showman. It follows his journey from being the host of a museum of odd things to being the leader of a circus.

I watched The Greatest Showman on the plane ride home from New York a couple months ago. The flight was at 11 so it wasn’t the best time for napping. I had meant to watch this movie while in theaters but never got the chance. Boy, am I glad I didn’t waste my money.

The pacing was pretty terrible at many points, and so was the plot development. I feel like they rushed through both the beginning and the end. I was really confused about the relationship between Barnum and his wife. There were points in the movie where we wouldn’t see her for many scenes and then boom, she’d just kind of show up. The side story with his daughter and the ballet thing was cute but didn’t seem very important for the story.

The character development was lagging in a lot of places. I didn’t understand a lot of the motivations for their actions.

I am all for corny romcoms on any day of the week, but not in this way. This movie was corny in some of the worst ways. It’s extremely predictable from beginning to end. Everything got resolved and they all sang together despite overlooking all the issues they’d had before. It was just a mess.

One of the other issues about this movie were the basic conflicts. “Oh no, she misunderstood and thinks I don’t care about her! Boo hoo.” and then the issue is resolved two minutes later. It honestly made me not care about what was going on with the characters. It was surreal in a bad way.

I can’t say everything was bad about this movie. For one thing, the choreography was wonderful. You could really tell they worked their butts off for that. The songs, on the other hand, were mediocre for the most part. There were two or three songs that were pretty great but the others were forgettable. That’s about it for the redeeming factor. It’s a good way to pass time if you’re not looking for something that’s not too deep.